Press Release

CityHack 2017 - The Competition for a Smarter City

Over 100 experts from Orange, Tremend and Actility gathered this weekend for a 24 hours smart city hackathon, CityHack 2017. During the competition, the participants prototyped and presented the newest solutions impacting the way we live, work and spend our time in the future cities.

Bucharest, Romania, September 28, 2017 --(PR.com)-- ”The idea behind organizing CityHack together with our partners from Orange and Actility started from the similarities in terms of culture and engineering DNA, among the three companies. A large number of participants, the synergy among the teams and the complexity of the projects showed the idea was a success.” Marius Hanganu, Managing Partner Tremend

The winning team showcased an innovative IoT waste management solution that leverages LoRa technology and is able to recognize the type of waste: glass, paper or plastic. The solution encourages people to recycle through gamification. The team on the second place presented a new concept of parking sharing while the owners are not using them, while the team on the third place used IoT, Machine Learning and face detection to prevent incidents in crowds, by counting the number of people at a given moment in a public place. The system alerts the authorities in case this number exceeds a safety limit.

During the same competition, participants presented Smart Parking solutions, traffic management at junctions for emergency cars, pits and obstacles detection on roads and anti-theft systems for bicycles, showing their exact position. Competitions also developed applications showing citizens the exact location of their public transportation vehicle and the time left to reach the station, contributing to lower the congestion in the cities.

"The Hackaton outcomes have exceeded our expectations! All the teams succeeded in providing what look like almost real use cases. They all perfectly understand the value added by the LoRaWAN technology which is great. As our aim was also to illustrate the way this cutting-edge IoT technology can help to address major smart city issues, this aim is more than met!," mentioned Alexandre Amiot, Director Ecosystem Partner Program, Actility.

The projects were evaluated based on their impact, their uniqueness but also based on their technical complexity. Integrating new technologies like IoT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data increased the level of complexity of each prototype.

CityHack 2017 is a practical learning experience, but also an opportunity to work with LoRa, which facilitates the communication among sensors and the Cloud environment, enabling a lower resources and energy consumption and improved long distance connectivity.

“An amazing event, in which the highest level technical expertise met the latest technologies in an experimental envinronment, free of any constraints. The result? Remarkable through the creativity and utility of the imagined solutions, the technical complexity and the level of their refining in the short time available," mentioned Bogdan Rotunjanu, IT Director Orange.